question, WHO PAID FOR IT? were both settled before the new lamp
was lighted the next evening.

You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives,
our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and
forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you
want to know about a person. Thus, "How's your health?" (commonly
pronounced haalth)--instead of, How do you do? or, How are you?
Or calling your little dark entry a "hall," and your old rickety
one-horse wagon a "kerridge." Or telling a person who has been trying
to please you that he has given you pretty good "sahtisfahction."
Or saying that you "remember of" such a thing, or that you have
been "stoppin"' at Deacon Somebody's,--and other such expressions.
One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the
parlor of his country-house,--bow, arrows, wings, and all complete.
A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the
figure, asked the lady of the house "if that was a statoo of her
deceased infant?" What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous
biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief
question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in
the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my
fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual
at whose door it lay.]

That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, Ex pede
Herculem. He might as well have said, "From a peck of apples you
may judge of the barrel." Ex PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, Ex
ungue minimi digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos
et proavos, filios, nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to me about your
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier's
getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz's drawing a
portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the "O"
revealed Giotto,--as the one word "moi" betrayed the Stratford
atte-Bowe-taught Anglais,--so all a man's antecedents and
possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at
once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.

Possibilities, Sir?--said the divinity-student; can't a man who
says Haow? arrive at distinction?

Sir,--I replied,--in a republic all things are possible. But the
man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that
any odious trick